Over and over it went, until the Badong cultivator grew increasingly restless. Strange, unsettling images kept flashing through his mind. They couldn’t be described, only imagined, and all of them left him unbearably irritable, his blood surging wildly.

He fought against the agitation with sheer willpower, but even the way he played his flute began to falter. The notes shifted off-key, and the giant serpent in the formation grew just as frenzied, thrashing against the white walls one moment, coiling around the stone pavilion the next, crashing and surging in every direction.

Dragged down again and again by Tigerheaded Dragon, the Badong cultivator never managed to fully concentrate on breaking the formation. The longer he lingered inside, the more of Liu Xiaolou’s bewildering Fragrance filled the air. His eyes turned bloodshot, his breathing heavy, and the visions in his mind grew even stranger. He could no longer tell illusion from reality, and everything before his eyes took on a hazy, dreamlike blur.

Could this illusion formation really be so overpowering?

Tigerheaded Dragon glared once more, roared in fury, and charged in swinging both arms. His clash with the great serpent threw the entire formation into chaos, even bringing down the small tower above the serpent’s lair.

As the lair collapsed, countless snakes slithered out in a frenzy, exposing a broken nest at the back. Inside were several snake eggs. The sight of them made the Badong cultivator’s whole body burn as if on fire. He pointed a technique gesture at the eggs, and his true qi poured out violently. The eggs exploded in an instant, and the blast tore the entire courtyard skyward.

The scene shifted again, and they were back at the banks of the Zhuoshui River. The Badong cultivator’s final explosive strike had finally overwhelmed Liu Xiaolou. The Abyssal Blackstone Formation shattered, and with a mournful hum, the formation disk flew back into his sleeve.

For a formation to break during battle was no light matter. The damage was far worse than simple depletion of true qi. Facing the Badong cultivator’s last strike, when he blasted the snake eggs apart, Liu Xiaolou had taken the brunt of it head-on. A mouthful of blood spurted out, and the Foot Faint Yin Meridian he was cultivating was the first to rupture, his acupoints across the body thrown into chaos.

The Badong cultivator did not come out unscathed either. He had been trapped in the formation for three whole incense sticks’ time, breathing in untold amounts of Bewildering Fragrance and battered by countless eerie illusions. Though he managed to break free, his spirit was left in a wildly unstable state. He was still restless, agitated, and unfocused, his scarlet eyes looking out at the world as if through a blur.

And it wasn’t just his mind. His true qi refused to flow smoothly, blocked at more than a hundred acupoints under the binding of the Mysterious True Cord. The fire within him had nowhere to vent, and so it forced itself into a brutal backlash. His loins swelled up like a mountain, straining as if to pierce the sky.

In such a condition, his agitation had reached the breaking point. He wanted nothing more than to crush the enemy before him, drag Su Jing back at once, and then find a place to vent this raging fire to his heart’s content.

Seeing Liu Xiaolou collapse to the ground, gravely injured, the Badong cultivator forcibly suppressed the near-mad restlessness in his heart. He steadied his playing and commanded the increasingly unresponsive phantom serpent to coil around Liu Xiaolou. One way or another, he had to finish him off completely before anything else.

But Tigerheaded Dragon charged forward again, throwing himself in front of Liu Xiaolou with desperate resolve. At this final moment there was no chance of holding anything back. From his sleeve flew a talisman slip, which ignited with a sharp crack. Flames coiled up both of his arms, shaping into a pair of searing iron staves that glowed as if red-hot. Faint streaks of violet radiance shimmered across them.

The Jiao clan’s secret life-preserving technique: the Talisman Fire Purple-Wing Technique!

This talisman was no easy thing to refine. Each one took three years to make, and once invoked, it bathed the arms in violet flame with the power to scorch an enemy’s meridians from afar. With both arms empowered, the strength of the body increased instantly by thirty to fifty percent, enough to challenge cultivators far above one’s own layer. It was created three centuries ago by an ancestor of the Jiao family who had entered the inner sect of the Qingyu Sect, and it was this technique that laid the foundation for the Jiao clan’s rise as a family of cultivators.

As the Purple-Wing Fire erupted, it caught the Badong cultivator completely off guard. Several of his meridians were seared in an instant, the pain so fierce that his very soul nearly tore itself from his body.

This one was ruthless. Instead of retreating after being wounded, he pressed forward. The phantom serpent coiled tightly around Tigerheaded Dragon, enduring the scorching flames of the Purple-Wing Fire. Flute held to his lips, the Badong cultivator blew out a note for the first time since the battle began.

A breaking tone. Its sound could be sensed, but not truly heard.

With that note, the serpent phantom exploded. In the billowing black smoke, Tigerheaded Dragon was blasted apart and flung away.

But this was the Badong cultivator’s strategy of wounding the enemy three thousand while injuring himself eight hundred. The phantom serpent he detonated would take two to three years of cultivation to restore.

Just then, numbness shot through his Foot Lesser Yang Meridian, freezing half his body on the spot. He knew the nature of poisons well, and in that instant he realized a highly concealed gu toxin had been planted in his meridians, now triggered by his injuries.

Damn. He had been poisoned. But who had done it?

He forced himself to recall, scenes from the past few days flashing rapidly through his mind, until they froze on a pair of hands. Hands that had once held tightly onto his own…

“Damn you to hell, you son of a bitch…” he cursed, when suddenly a strange sensation struck him below.

He looked down in shock. Beneath him, covered in blood, Liu Xiaolou had somehow crawled up without his notice. With trembling hands he clutched an ordinary longsword, its tip faintly flickering with sword-light.

That sword-light was no more than three inches long, limp and drooping…

Drooping right against the Badong cultivator’s rigidly erect flesh, curling around it like a tender willow branch swaying in the wind.

A wave of nameless terror surged up from his heart. Cold sweat broke out all over his body. Everything around him seemed to slow unnaturally. He struggled to open his mouth, wanting to speak, but no words came. He tried to move, but his body was locked rigid, unable to escape.

“Damn you, you son of a bitch…”

In the blink of an eye, Liu Xiaolou, still coughing blood, gave a sudden pull. The soft sword-light knotted like a grass stem, then wrenched downward, dragging with it a severed piece of flesh and blood.

It was the very root of the Badong cultivator’s serpent gu cultivation, his fatal weak point. With that single stroke, Liu Xiaolou cut it away. No blood flowed, but a cloud of black smoke burst out instead. At once venomous toxin, and the true qi the Badong cultivator had cultivated for so many years.

Liu Xiaolou no longer had the strength to hold his breath. Thin wisps of poison smoke slipped into his ears, nose, and throat, seeped into his meridians, and he fell into unconsciousness.

The black smoke finally cleared. The cultivator from Badong collapsed to the ground, and the Mysterious True Cord shot back to Liu Xiaolou’s wrist, where it once again sank into his veins like a bulging vein.

By the river, everything suddenly grew quiet. Four people lay sprawled across the ground, cold wind sweeping over them. Far off on Donglin Mountain, light and shadow still clashed, thunder rolling through the storm. A violet-gold dragon writhed and circled the peak, locked in a savage chase with several divine serpents.

At one moment, the violet-gold dragon clamped down on one serpent’s head and tore it off, but at the same time another serpent sank its teeth into the dragon’s claw. The dragon’s scream shook heaven and earth.

The sound rippled outward, startling Tigerheaded Dragon lying unconscious by the riverbank. Because of his tempered body, he was the toughest of them all, and he was the first to wake. His whole body was covered in wounds.

But he had no time to care about his injuries. Struggling to his feet, staggering with every step, he dragged himself to Liu Xiaolou’s side. Without even checking if he was alive, he grabbed him by the leg and hauled him away, stumbling and swaying with each step.

As they passed the body of the Badong cultivator, Liu Xiaolou suddenly coughed and stirred awake in a daze. With great effort, he reached out and clutched the corpse, refusing to let go.

Tigerheaded Dragon had no choice but to stop. He looked back at Liu Xiaolou. “Xiaolou…”

Liu Xiaolou was too weak to explain. He fumbled over the corpse again and again until he pulled out a pouch, then pointed to the bone flute lying on the ground nearby.

Helpless, Tigerheaded Dragon stooped sideways to pick it up and shoved it into Liu Xiaolou’s hands. Liu Xiaolou gripped the flute tightly, then pointed toward Su Jing.

Only then did Tigerheaded Dragon remember. He went over, grabbed Su Jing by the leg, then came back and took hold of one of Liu Xiaolou’s legs, dragging both of them away.

Bracing against the cold wind, he staggered eastward, step by uneven step. By dawn, he reached a patch of forest more than ten miles away, where he spotted a crumbling mud hut. Unable to hold out any longer, he hauled Liu Xiaolou and Su Jing inside and dropped heavily to the ground.

After catching his breath, he heard the faint, shivering gasps of Liu Xiaolou and Su Jing. He gathered some dead branches and kindling, lit a fire in the hut, and soon warmth filled the room.

With the fire came a little life. Su Jing woke first, then Liu Xiaolou. Neither of them had the strength to speak. They leaned close to the flames, forcing their battered bodies to fight against the poison running through their veins.